


Team B: Panamanian Moon

by apiphile



Series: Team B [4]
Category: Doctor Who (2005), Torchwood
Genre: Death of Bystanders, Explosions, Fix-It, Gen, I don't know anything about Panama, Imprisonment, M/M, Pogril-Copenbul Cousinry, blowjobs as bargaining tool, dodgy Spanish, grisly murders, injury to eye, novel-length, protagonist is a psychopath
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-10
Updated: 2010-05-10
Packaged: 2017-10-09 09:42:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,758
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Team arrive in Panama and attempt to deal with an alien disturbance. Please read Marching Orders, Cold Comfort and High Seas first.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Team B: Panamanian Moon

**Author's Note:**

> Huge thanks go to myselftheliar for Spanish translation, and thanks also to the_funmonkey for giving me funny lines to put in this. Anything that doesn't make you laugh is obviously her fault. Apologies to any Panamanian residents for imperfect research.

The man currently styling himself Captain John Hart wandered along the quayside with a football under his arm, a knife in his boot, and a sense of slightly fidgety smug wellbeing. It was possible that the remainder of his "team" would have been surprised to see him armed with a football, as it certainly wasn't his and he hadn't had it when they disembarked, but they were safely back in their hotel room attempting to call Cardiff and explain just what the hell had happened on their way to Panama and find out what the hell they were meant to do now. They had been quite grateful to see him go.

John bounced the unusually heavy ball from palm to palm as he swaggered on through the light drizzle, attracting a range of stares: some repulsed, some fearful, some lustful, some envious, all fascinated. It was tempting to pirouette under the many gazes, but he had his own little side-mission to complete before he started _really_ showing off.

"Ay, _maricon!_" someone shouted, and John flashed them the smile he'd stolen from Jack.

It wasn't long before he found what he was looking for; a hand-painted sign advertised simply "bar", a middle-aged man slumped on a wooden chair outside without any concession to the clammy rainfall, and the doorway sunk a few include below the street-level. The whole place reeked of nefarious dealings.

"Policía?" John asked the man on the chair, indicating the bar with a jerk of his thumb.

"Not here," the man smirked. His teeth were gold-plated. "You have something to sell, American? Or are you buying?"

"Selling," John said, his free hand already on the door-frame. "And I'm not American."

"Cualquier," said the man as John ducked inside.

Inside somehow contrived to be even more seedy; there was not even the glimmer of a beer sign, there was sawdust on the floor, and even the shadows had shadows. John felt immediately at home and 30% more alive than he already did. The handful of men – no women in _this_ dive – all regarded him with open hostility and the air of junkyard dogs greeting an especially impudent kitten that has just wandered into their lot.

"En venta," John said, hoisting the heavy football up on the flat palm of one hand.

"We have plenty of footballs," the barman said with a laugh. It was not a pleasant laugh, and the barman didn't look the sort who could manage 'friendly'.

John slapped the ball down on the bar and sparkled his teeth at the guy in the aperture of a menacing grin. "Open it up and you'll see why _this_ one might just be worth your time."

The rest of the clientele crawled closer as the barman slit the leather ball with an evil-looking over-sharpened kitchen knife; John could smell cordite, beer, and sweat on them as they surrounded him. There was a low whistle when the two sides of the cut were peeled back to reveal several clear plastic bags full of white dust; the barman looked up at John and John gave him another smile.

"Know anyone who can give me a good price?" John said, trying to keep the purr out of his voice and fairly.

"I give you five thousand American for it," the barman said, his dismissive tone belied by the avarice shining in his flat brown eyes.

John snorted. "Don't _insult_ me, I said a _good_ price."

"You insult _me_," the barman said in a soft and dangerous voice. "I have no assurance of you or what you are selling."

"Cut me out a bit, then," John offered, batting his eyelashes. "I'll give you your fucking assurance."

The atmosphere in the room grew even more tense as John and his little audience of Bad Men leaned in even closer to watch as a line – short and fat and puffy – was extracted and flattened on the surface of the bar, then swished straight and long and thin by the clean-sharp edge of the barman's knife.

He handed a metal tube to John without a word, and in one swoop John cleaned the deck of uncut cocaine, tugged the knife from the barman's grip, licked the blade, and handed it back with a friendly pat.

"Perfectly decent," John showed his teeth again in an even more worrying smile. "Now that you've finished pissing around, I want to talk _business_."

"Alright," said the barman, "let's talk business."

It was unclear to John whether it was the cold pressure on his temple or the click of a hammer being cocked that first told him one of the other men had a gun ready to splatter his brains around the windowless room, but the information reached his synapses damn fast either way.

"How did you come by this?" the barman said, his voice the same soft-dangerous rumble as before. "This is not yours."

"I stole it," John admitted with what was traditionally but unfortunately this time not _literally_ a disarming smile. The gun pressed harder against his temples. That was probably going to dent.

"Where did you steal it?" the barman's voice was as loaded as the gun against John's head.

"Oh, there was some boy on a scooter. A shitty grey scooter. Cute, too. Screamed a lot. Crying shame, wasting such pretty eyelashes on a whiny little child like that – "

One of the other men punched John in the kidneys quite hard.

"You think you can come in here, touting our own fucking shipments at us, and demand money?" the barman growled.

John considered this. "Yes," he said, and dropped to his knees.

As he went down he hit out, catching the man with the loaded gun squarely in the gonads with his elbow. He rolled into someone's legs as a deafening bark of gunfire echoed round the little room, and someone grunt-yelled in what sounded to John's experienced ear like fatal pain. He reached into his boot.

John bounced back to his feet again, knife in hand, and reached over the bar and grabbed the barman by a handful of his thick, greasy hair. He yanked the man half-over the high table top and pressed the length of his knife over the barman's throat so tightly that a fine line of red formed like a narrow ribbon beneath it.

"Dinero," John sighed, glaring around at the remaining clientele, not sparing a glance for the bloodied figure groaning helplessly on the floor, "déme el dinero _ahora_."

"We don't have – " began one of the other men.

"Ah-ha-ha – " John chided, raising his eyebrows. "Knife, throat, dead boss. And I wouldn't go considering it as an opportunity to limb the corporate ladder, either, because it'll be a really _short_ stay at the top." He licked his lips. "So. Money. _Now_, if you don't mind."

There was an uncomfortable shuffling, and the remaining men scrabbled billfolds out of their pockets. One of them edged to the cash register and extracted a further pile, and the whole mess was deposited on the bar beside John. He cast a calculating glance over it; he was not _terribly_ smart _all_ the time (he'd believe that flash bastard and his loyalty talk for years, after all), but if there was one thing John Hart was very clever about, it was money.

"That's a lot _less_ than even five thousand," he said baldly.

The men looked at each other nervously. One of them spat on the floor. The barman twisted his face up into a decent approximation of a defiant sneer and snarled, "Mentí."

"Whaddayaknow," John said, smiling serenely at the angry-looking Bad Men as he shifted his grip on the handle of his knife. "Mentí, también. Your boss is going to die over a kilo and three quarters of finest quality uncut British sherbert."

He jerked his knife up and sideways, the give of skin and sinew beneath its edge so sudden and so perfect that John got a tingle in his scalp, a jolt down his spine, even before the flood came pouring forth.

The blood fountained out like a waterfall of crimson and John leapt back, dancing away from it as if it were a sword. To the credit of the rest of the clientele, they didn't freeze up or start yelling as if they'd never seen someone opened up before, just backed away from the mess as John held his knife by the sodden tip in throwing fashion. They weren't, of course, to know that it wasn't a throwing knife and that John was at any rate about as accurate with them as he was good at composing Homeric verse; one of the men said, "That's all the money we got. There isn't anymore."

"Three thousand piss-measly dollars?"

The man making the excuse nodded.

John sighed. "Give me the gun. SLOWLY."

The gun was handed cautiously to him, hand-grip first. It was a _shit_ gun, but John'd come to expect that. He wasn't even overly fond of them as a means of killing, unlike his so-called former partner; they lacked intimacy, and the bang tended to blot out all that delightful gurgling and screaming as well as blowing one's cover as well (and not as prettily) as an explosion. Nevertheless, he cocked it and pointed it into their midst, and set about shoving the somewhat soggy and reddened hundred dollar bills from the bar into various pockets about his person.

"See, now, was that so hard?" John blew them a kiss as he made for the door. "You can keep the sherbert, if you like."

The chair outside the bar was empty as he left, and the rain had stopped, although the skies still looked ominous. John knocked the safety back on, stuffed the gun down the back of his waistband, and sauntered away.

He managed to get lost of the way back to the hotel.

John had never exactly been blessed with a brilliant sense of direction or memory for landmarks, but until sodding _Jones_ had destroyed the Vortex Manipulator with his 'saving everyone's lives' nonsense it hadn't mattered so much; the device was more than capable of plotting a route for him with information borrowed from the relevant satellites. If the blasted man wasn't so ridiculously nice to look at John would still be quite annoyed about that.

Even with _his_ poor memory for landmarks John knew he was lost; the area he found himself in was quite run-down, in contrast to the glittering new buildings around the hotel they'd checked into (still perpetuating John's _brilliant_ cover story of being a rock star travelling with his manager, the pale-faced and tired Mr. Jones, and his security Man, Mick_ay_ Smiff) yesterday at midnight. This looked more like a documentary film about urban something or other, the cars rusting and children and dogs mingling in some impenetrably complex canine-child game.

Across the wet street an old woman sat on what John assumed was _her_ doorstep, at the front of a depressed-looking shop. She looked like she'd been grown there from the leftover old women of ten other races, and she seemed to be staring into another universe.

John bounded across the road, his boots skidding on spilt motor oil, and sprung to a straight-backed stop a few feet from the octogenarian.

"Buenas tardes, Señora."

She didn't look at him. "Que quieres? Your Spanish is shitty."

John's mind threw up two possible answers to that: _it's just as bad as your fucking English, you old witch_, which was one, but he ended up seizing upon the other.

"You know where I can find some prostitutes around here?" he smiled, wide and sharkish, his hands resting automatically on his hips. "Putas?"

She ignored him, her hands folded in her lap, cradling a brace of orange slices.

"Chocolate, then? I bet you have chocolate in that shop, I'll eat it while I'm looking, "Puedo encontrar a mis propias putas." John settled his weight into his hips and gave her a smile which would have scandalised de Sade. She ignored him again.

He sighed. "_Directions_, at least! ¿Cómo consigo a la buena área de la ciudad? The new developments? The good hotels?"

"You American?" the old woman asked suspiciously, at last. She looked like the word 'American' existed in the same mental category as 'dog shit' for her.

"Do I _sound_ American?" John glared. "I'm from Cardiff." The lie wasn't as easy as he'd been expecting, and his mind nearly substituted any one of a thousand other locations. Clammy mist began to coalesce in the air again. The old woman examined her orange slices.

Silence was his only reply.

"Wales?" he hazarded.

Again, nothing but silence greeted him. Silence, and a raised orange slice.

"Britain? Europe?" John suggested, rocking on the balls of his feet.

She stared at him and sucked her orange slice meditatively for a moment. "I know where Cardiff is, you little shit," the old woman said. Her teeth were disgusting. "I was seeing how far you'd dig." She didn't seem to find this very amusing. "And with that made-up accent, you aren't from fucking Wales."

"Oh aren't I?"

"Or America." She spat out the orange slice. "There's something wrong with you, you pasty fuck. You're not from anywhere _I_ know."

John straightened up from his slouch and rotated his shoulders one by one, slow and threatening, his smile wandering about through _lazy_ to _menacing_. "Alright," he said, "I'm from the Third Sphere of the Pogril System in the Collapsed Frequency beyond the remains of the Medusa Cascade." The words came so easily it was like they had never gone away. "I'm the only child of the Fifth Integration and the eighth of the Pogril-Copenbul Cousinry, my full name would take you half an hour to listen to and I haven't told anyone any of this in a decade." He bit down hard on the end of his tongue to keep the rest of it, the learned-by-rote bit, from spilling out too. He couldn't afford to be there all night.

The old lady narrowed her eyes. "You're crazy."

John grinned, his own blood spread over his teeth in a film of crimson. "Yes," he said, pulling a knife from his boot. "That, too."

She eyed his still-bloody knife with little concern – there was _some_ fear in her deep-set dark eyes, but not as much as he might have expected. "You don't impress me."

"I don't, do I?" John peered past the tip of the knife to her steady face.

"You think men with knives don't come here every day? Get out." Her voice said she meant it; her eyes said it didn't matter that she meant it, she was still scared. John was an unknown quantity, but the old woman could see just as well as anyone else who'd ever looked at him that John Hart didn't put shackles on the arm that wielded a weapon.

So she was probably almost expecting it when he grabbed her by the throat and shoved her up to her feet, back into her own shop – but that didn't make it any less fun. John felt the strains of _The Ninth Dover Cliff_ stirring in his blood and kicked the door shut behind them as the old woman struggled soundlessly. She might have been grunting, she might have been yelling, but the pounding of his heart almost blotted it out.

He'd been twelve years old when he snatched up a two-foot length of lead-alloy pipe and swung it again and again and again, and had first truly discovered that – sex, drugs, drink, hypnosis and cruelty all inferior – there was no high that could equal the twin strains of adrenaline he experienced that day.

First: knowing that against all the odds and the will of the universe, he was still _a-fucking-live_, his patched, genetically weak heart still frantically pounding his precious perfectly altered blood through his veins.

And second: seeing that he'd ended someone else. Not injured them or frightened them or knocked them out or chased them away, as he had before with animals, with slaves, but stolen life out of their hands as completely as any accident or illness. Him. He had that power.

Two things 'Captain' Death Isn't Final Jack, Captain Suddenly Moral Harkness was never going to experience again, and yet John's smugness about that was regrettably short-lived. Fortunately each fresh death inflicted, each terminal situation avoided, was a little spark in the whorls of his mind and a jolt to his body; I am _alive_, I am _alive_.

By comparison filleting an uppity old sack wasn't exactly a fine-wine drinking afternoon so much as chugging 4% beer in an alleyway, but John knew how to make do with what there was. He balanced his knife carefully in his hand – it still gleamed red with the barman's blood – and stroked her wrinkled old cheek with the fearsome tip; the air in his lungs tasted sweeter, the world came into sharper focus, the colours grew brighter, and John slammed the blade up to the hilt into her right eye.

"Squelch," he announced, stepping back. As always, the eyeball sucked possessively on the knife, like a cheap whore in a town he burned down many years ago – he let her fall to the floor, blood dribbling down her face and spreading along the lines of age in the company of the vitreous humours. "See," he told her, returning his knife to its sheath inside his boot, "I'm quite nice, really. That didn't take long and I bet it didn't hurt very much either."

John squatted beside her, his toes in the congealing blood, and added, "y mi español es _muy bueno_."

He surveyed the room. On a table roughly in the centre was a small pile of assorted chocolate bars and packets of corn chips, covered in dust, and a few scratched postcards and odd plastic figurines. He stuffed a Mars bar in his pocket, picked up a card which depicted the hotel he was _pretty_ certain the 'team' were staying in, and stepped out just as the rain began again in earnest.

* * *

A damp and tired John Hart swiped his keycard on the rather primitive bedroom lock, and bounded into Mickey's room with a malignant energy that he really didn't fucking feel after all that trudging around. Mickey and Jones jerked their heads round to look at him like startled meerkats, and John beamed at them both. It was a smile without a scrap of sincerity in it, not least because he was still angry over getting _lost_ like an idiot or because he was really feeling his fucking age.

"I got you chocolate," he announced to the room, casting the half-melted Mars bar onto the bed.

They stared at it him.

"What? _What?_" John demanded, annoyed. "I got you _chocolate_."

They stared some more.

"_WHAT_?"

It was Mickey who answered him, in that _tone_ he had. "You're … you have … there is blood all over you." He didn't bother to say 'again'. John knew the 'again' was there, it didn't need voicing. Mickey had 'again' on his face.

"I _fell_," John suggested helpfully. He saw Mickey and Jones exchange that look, the Do You Want To Dispute Him / I Don't Fancy The Truth Anymore exchange they probably thought he didn't notice.

"Right," said Mickey. "Well." He glanced at Jones. "We didn't get through to Jack, apparently something's crashed outside Newport and he's sort of busy getting that under control. But Gwen says – "

"Ah, the lovely Gwen," John interrupted.

"Shut up," Jones explained. He looked both better and worse for being well enough to wear his suit again; John'd kind of liked rumpled, vulnerable Jones without his Jack-mandated business-armour a bit better, but at least now he didn't look so much like he was going to die any minute.

"Gwen _says_," Mickey repeated, growling but still acting like neither of them had spoken, "what we're looking at here is a bit of a mystery. There've been increasing reports of missing children and pets – not usually our remit, I know, shut up, John – "

"I DIDN'T SAY ANYTHING."

" – you just did. Anyway, some of the parents have been mentioning an animal, something fast in the dark, and men with guns. Which is probably not all that unusual." He added in a slightly wavering voice, the kind of waver people get when they're angry, "Apparently the police didn't listen at first because they were just ghetto kids, but a tourist kid's vanished recently as well, now, and they're going _apeshit_ trying to find anything that might be a connection."

"Hooray, lost jailbait," John struck a pose. "Automatic heroes and a big fat fucker of a reward. I like it."

"We're not officially here and is that a gun," Mickey corrected.

"Oh come _on_," John sighed, extracting it and dangling it in front of Mickey's face. "_You've_ got that massive rail cannon sonic deal. _And_ a robot dog that CAN'T DO ANYTHING HELPFUL – " he addressed this to the inert, ticking-over box in the corner of the room. "And Jones has … snide remarks … I _deserve_ a weapon."

Mickey pinched the bridge of his nose. "Hang onto it, then. I suppose we might need it. Just … not in your waistband like some idiot rapper, okay? _You_ should know better than that. Fuck's sake."

"So where do we start looking?" Jones asked, studiously ignoring John. The whole 'ignoring' thing wasn't too effective – John could see the vein in his head _throb_ whenever he got into Jones's space enough, or said the right things. It was a fun game to see just how far he could push; at home the literal version had been called _sparke belgili tanımlık ayı_, on 21st Century Earth it was apparently either "Grandmother's footsteps" or "brinkmanship" depending on which bit of the internet he looked at.

"All the disappearances have been reported around Curundu, Calidonia, and Santa Ana, except for the tourist, who went missing in El Chorrillo, the Calidonia end of the area," Mickey said, presumably for John's benefit.

"Your accent is incredibly shit," John pointed out.

"So," Mickey went on, frowning, "if I take K-9 tonight and try to cover as much of El Chorrillo to Santa Ana as I can, you and John can – "

"Can't _I_ take K-9 instead," Jones asked, his forehead crinkling into a pleading expression which John found simultaneously irritating and adorable.

"No."

"But – "

"No. He's _my_ dog," Mickey said firmly, "and you can't shoot fast enough or well enough at the moment – "

"_Hey_," Jones frowned even more deeply. "I have the taser."

"An _actual_ gun," Mickey said, putting the metaphorical foot down hard. "You're going with John, and that's an order. If you're going through that area, you need protection."

John waggled his eyebrows and flexed a bicep at Jones, who made a venomous face.

"And who's going to protect me from _him_?" Jones complained.

John was almost prepared to concede that he had a point. It was certainly one which had been made before by other teams on other worlds in other times. No one quite trusted him not to stab them in the back, which was quite sensible, what with the number of times he _had_ stabbed teammates squarely and hard in the spine. Literally, in some cases. Though, this time, Jones really _didn't_ have a point. Still, it wasn't necessary for him to know that.

"If the fact that he clearly wants to shag you isn't enough …" Mickey muttered. Jones went pink, and John pretended he hadn't heard, the way he did with a good half of everything said to and about him. Jones's ears had gone an especially fetching hue.

"Question," John said, when he judged the uncomfortable silence to be awkward enough that they'd let him speak to cover it up. "Why are we going at night? You know, those places get slightly _less_ safe when the sun goes down."

Mickey rolled his eyes. He did that so often, and yet not quite as often as Jones, that John occasionally wondered if their eyeballs would pop out someday. He rather hoped it was while he was watching. "Because that's when the children have been reported as going missing." He passed John a mobile phone, not actually touching his hand. "Stay in contact. I want to know the minute you find anything, you understand?"

"Oook ook."

"Don't be a dick." And then the bastard gave John a small, tight, sarcastic smile. "Oh, and it has GPS."

"What?"

"Jack's said a couple of times that you get lost easily," Mickey continued, grinning all over his stupid fucking face, "and what with your Vortex Manipulator out of commission …"

It was interesting, John thought, to observe how angry Jones looked at this, as if _he_ were the one who had had his one functioning bit of home-era kit thoughtlessly destroyed by some stupid heroics. For his own part the emotions warring inside his skull and stomach - _Jack remembered, Jack said, Jack thinks_ \- were so acute, so heightened, that he shut them down and said in a flat and empty voice, "How sweet. He remembers."

"Apparently you had the all-time worst record in the entire agency for getting lost and that's why you ended up partnered with him," Mickey said with that infuriating smile still on. John knew very well he was being baited – he even knew that it was payback for his frequent digs at Jones and that in the grand scheme of things it meant nothing, less than a gnat's fart. All this knowledge didn't stop something in his head from winding up that little tiny bit tighter.

"But the _best_ kill rate," he said with smugness so faked that it was probably obvious even to them, "and that _wasn't_ the reason."

"We leave here at dusk," Mickey concluded, "which is about seven at this time of year, apparently. Until then no one's going anywhere – John, I don't want you wandering off and getting _lost_ … or causing more trouble."

"And I don't care what you fucking want," John muttered.

"_John_," Mickey sighed, eyeballing him, hands on hips, using every single inch of his extra height, "shut up and do as you're told."

John slammed the door on the way out, so hard that he heard the paint on the doorframe crack. His own room, next door, offered little in the way of delights; he'd emptied the minibar when they arrived, and the pornography offered by the hotel's TV channel was about as sexually stimulating as a cold compress. Possibly even less so.

He amused himself until the sky grew dismal by stealing a fire extinguisher and using it plus the contents of his room to make a theoretically viable rocket-launcher, but in the absence of any actual rockets he was forced to settle for firing empty vodka miniatures at the ceiling at speeds of around a hundred and fifty miles an hour. Most of them burnt holes in the panels above and carried on upwards, but enough of them exploded in showers of glittering glass dust to prevent him from being too _utterly_ bored.

Boredom, alas, came easily to John Hart. Although he was quite adept at making his own fun given the right company and chemicals to make it from, he'd never really got the hang of quiet pleasures (reading, especially, perplexed him; instructions and contracts were about the limit of his reading interests) and he certainly didn't enjoy being on his own. Ever. He was almost grateful when his new phone beeped up the message: "we're on. Lobby in five."

John hurtled out of his room like he'd been fired from a slingshot, bounced off the wall opposite with both feet, and leered at his fellow guest for the entire lift-ride down to the lobby. A night prowling the darker, scarier corners of Panama City in the presence of The Competition promised to at least be more fun than staring at the holes in the hotel room ceiling.

Mickey greeted him with the usual sigh. Jones was, as ever, ignoring him. "Have you even _heard_ of 'inconspicuous'?" Mickey asked. John noted the change in style – Mickey had switched his usual 'I am taking this military leadership deal far too seriously' gear for an outfit more suited to ghetto trawling – but made a face all the same.

"Oh come _on_," he protested, "Jones is wearing a fucking _suit_. How are the good criminal fraternity of Curundu not going to take one look at that pretty face and good tailoring and yell 'policía'?"

"Because it's _good_ tailoring," Jones muttered, "have you _seen_ what the police here wear?"

Not a bad one, although in John's opinion he'd had better lines.

"Will you two please save the flirting for later?" Mickey said without interest. K-9, the world's most pointless robot, idled and hummed beside his 'Master'. It was almost impressive how little interest the hotel's staff and guests were paying to this obvious anachronism in their midst; this, John thought bitterly, was just another example of why the Agency's strangling rules and protocols about chronoanomalous behaviour were so fucking pointless.

The look Jones shot their intrepid leader was appropriately and predictably poisonous.

"Okay," Mickey added, checking his watch. "Back here by dawn. Try to stay out of trouble with the law – Ianto, don't let him get himself arrested – "

"Oh, _great_, what am I going to do, keep him on a lead?"

"If you _liiiike_," John drawled.

"- and _stay in touch_. I mean that." Mickey gave them all a nod which worked as well as any wagged finger, and left the hotel, his ridiculous robot dog in close tow. John still hadn't made up his mind whether Mickey was completely useless and just very lucky, or an excellent leader who was far too subtle in his machinations for John's typically subtextless mind to deal with, or if he was actually being underhandedly managed by Jones. Most of the reason he hadn't figured this out, John decided, was because team dynamics were _dull_.

"Here we go," he told Jones as they walked out of the revolving door, "Team Jilted Ex. That's better than whatever the hell it is the paperwork has on it now, isn't it? You know I'm right."

Jones sighed but didn't answer him. The street was humid and the smell of food wafted along on the breeze.

"I am right, aren't I? Team Jilted Ex would be the most accurate name ever? Or … The Ex-Boyfriends. That _does_ make us sound like an indie band, though. Hrm. No," John continued, almost able to _hear_ Jones's blood pressure, shooting up like a rocket, "I think Team Jilted Ex is much more …poetic. Go on, tell me I'm right. You _know_ I'm right."

"John," Jones said from between clenched teeth, "you are never right. Now shut up."

"I get the feeling you're not entering into the spirit of this teamwork thing," John pouted, making puppy-dog eyes at the side of the man's head. Jones did look so terribly pretty when he was riled.

"I'm suggesting we rename ourselves Team Shut Up And Die, John Hart," Jones said in a faraway voice.

"_Captain_," John corrected. It was such a small thing, but he had, once, sort of earned that rank with an actual promotion. He'd lied about a few things in order to _be_ promoted, maybe, and offered a few sexual favours and maybe blackmailed one or two people into letting him take the credit for things they'd done, but he'd been _promoted_ to it legitimately. He _had_.

The way to the area they were to search was long and dull and Jones, in charge of team finances, wouldn't let them get a taxi, and John's knife sheath had already worn a sore patch on his heel trying to walk _back_ earlier in the day. And so he whined.

And whined.

And whined.

He only stopped whining when Jones reached into the pocket where he kept his bloody taser, and John was forced to leap out of the road to avoid an oncoming scooter.

The scooter slowed to a crawl and, under the sparse street-lights, the driver turned his helmetless, scruffy-haired head to stare, slow and threatening, at John. John gave him a sarcastic wave and a huge, shit-eating grin.

"_What_," Jones asked in a tone of voice that suggested that he really didn't want to know at all, "was that about?"

"I'm irresistible," John reminded him.

"Astonishingly not," Jones muttered.

Something moved in the shadows between their miraculously unsmashed streetlight and the next, forty yards away.

"What was that?" Jones added, turning quickly.

"A soon-to-dead-something," John assured him, flipping the shitty stolen gun into his hand and straight into firing position, thumbing the safety.

Jones held up a hand, palm-out. If he thought that was a universal gesture for 'stop' he was very much mistaken. "It might be a kid," Jones whispered.

"Then it's a soon-to-be-dead _kid_," John shrugged.

"_John_."

"What? It's _dark_, it's the _ghetto_, and there's a fucking … whatever on the prowl, not to mention bad men with guns." John watched the darkness, but nothing stirred. The grey-brown shadows seeping into blackness were indistinct, the corrugated-iron walls of shacks lending nothing but texture and confusion to the murk.

"And I have a taser and I _will_ knock you out and leave you here," Jones retorted. It was the emphasis on _will_ that gave him away, of course; the kind of person who would didn't bother to tell you they were going to – John had been that person and worked with that person, and for all his rage and coldness Jones wasn't ever going to be that kind. John didn't take his eyes off the grey space that filled the air before them.

"I think we should get out of the light," John said, and the shadows blurred together, and the thing's teeth were at his throat –

\- he squeezed the trigger -

\- the red was already in his eyes -

\- the shadows dropped away -

\- he was lying on his back on the wet road, his lungs burning, with Jones staring ashen-faced into the night. The adrenaline stirring John's nerves made them twitch and jump – his legs shook, but he was on his feet again even before Jones mouthed the words _what the fuck was that?_

The spent bullet went _tinkle_ on the pavement as it landed. No resistance, then, had been met. John readied himself again, the safety beneath his finger. "It can see us," he pointed out. "I hope you've got that fucking silly tas---"

The shadows blurred again, and John leapt at Jones, catching his midriff with his shoulder. They both hit the floor hard, Jones _oof-ing_ spent air from his startled lungs, John's gun bouncing once on the rough ground as it shuddered from his grip. Something passed John's ear at speed.

"_Shit_."

"Ow," Jones said in a ghost of a voice. "This had better not be some elaborate ploy to get into my underwear."

"I'd use Rohypnol," John reassured him. "But, since we're _here_ … oh yeah, something is trying to kill us. Maybe later." He rolled off and onto his feet, the warmth of Jones's body imprinted along his own, the smell of him still there. _How long has it been since I fucked someone? A week?_ He only barely noticed Jones standing slowly, holding his forearm over his belly.

John scanned the shadows, but the glare of the streetlight was so bright that everything outside the circle of orange-white was almost invisible, blending into itself. "You stay in the light," John instructed, stooping to pick up his gun again, "I'm going out there to find that fucker - you distract it and I'll – "

"Run off," Jones said sourly, peering around in the dark his mouth slightly open, pink lips curving off each other …

"Alright," John said, backing until his shoulders came into contact with Jones's back, "but at the moment _it_ can see _us_ and we can't see it – "

"Don't even think about shooting out that light," Jones warned, because despite everything else he claimed he clearly knew a _little_ about how John's mind worked. He hadn't flinched away from John's shoulders yet, but Jones was tense as a … as a –

"Fuck knows," John murmured, sweeping the semi-circle with out-stretched gun. "Can you see anything?"

"No," Jones whispered, "everything is … blurry."

"DOWN," John yelled, dropping to his knees. Jones hit the floor a second later and half a second after that the impression of teeth and claws slipped through John's consciousness again, almost without touching his eyes. "Where the fuck _is_ it …?"

There was a long moment when neither of them spoke – dogs howled and barked at each other, cars grumbled, sirens wailed in the distance, John tried to pick something from the gloom, back on his feet again like his knees were made of rubber (and oh hell they really _weren't_), his spine against Jones's.

Jones said, very quietly, "Do you think it's a – "

"No." John held his breath and counted. Nothing. "I know what you're going to say and _no_. I _killed_ her, I know what they're like."

"It was like this," Jones insisted in a low voice. "Just something fast in the dark."

John screwed up his face; the ghetto street didn't discourage so much as a lost cat to account for the electric, living feel of the air.

"… you _did_ kill her, didn't you?" Jones added. "I always thought you were the 'heads of my enemies in a burlap sack' sort."

John frowned. Being so comprehensively nailed was surprisingly uncomfortable. It felt like an intrusion. "I … probably did. Can we concentrate on not dying _now_, please?" The last glimmerings of light in the very west of the sky had almost died, leaving a dirty glow above some of the buildings – certainly not enough to see by.

"You didn't do it," Jones concluded angrily – John could feel his back muscles tightening to even tenser springs of potential violence. "She … it … that thing was _after Jack_," he hissed, "she was after _him_ and you let her live."

"I don't _know_," John protested, trying to let his gaze slide carefully but rapidly over the near-invisible street, "I don't know how those things die or if they even _can_, okay? I took her to fucking bits, that's the best I can fucking DO – " something moved – John jerked his head to follow it, but it was nothing more than a strip of cloth caught and fluttering on some loose wire. "You know, on a list of people who're in significant, life-endangering peril right now Jack's probably not as high up as, oh, say, _us_ \- DOWN!"

They both flattened themselves out on the slightly muddy ground again, falling in different directions as the image of teeth flashed like summer lightning before John's startled eyes – he lashed out with his gun hand but failed to connect, the weapon swinging round and catching Jones on the side of the head inside.

"_Ow_," Jones remarked, glaring at him.

"Oh, stop complaining." John sprang up. "Are we going to stay here until fucking dawn or are we catching that thing?" He shuffled back to back with Jones again, and once again Jones didn't back away.

"What _exactly_ are you planning to do? You can't even shoot it," Jones muttered, and John rolled his eyes into their spot-lit circle.

"I don't see _you_ thinking of anything," he snapped, steadying his grip on the gun. "Mr. Fucking Taser – "

"John," Jones said in a very small voice, "I think we may have another, more immediate problem."

"Ah," John said, spotting it immediately, "you mean the men with guns."

"That'd be the one, yup."

"_I_ have a gun," John pointed out helpfully.

"There are a lot _more_ of them than us," Jones observed.

"Are you suggesting we _surrender_?" John asked in a scandalised voice. At least one of the men who now encircled them had an evil-looking facial scar that looked more like the laceration of several claws and a knife wound. Interesting.

"No, I'm – "

"Excellent idea," John interrupted, radiating relief, "Ay! ¡Nos entregamos! ¡Amigos! ¡No me tire!"

"You are the world's biggest coward," Jones growled.

"_Living_ coward," John corrected, holding his hands up, the gun dangling uselessly from his thumb. He offered up one of his most obsequious smiles. "Ay! ¡Amigos! ¡No intentando conseguir el tiro! ¡Hola!"

"Maybe that _thing_ will eat them," Jones sighed. "And you."

"Doesn't seem likely," John muttered as two of the men stepped into light and knocked John's stolen gun from his hand.

"I think it's theirs," Jones said, then, "¡No tenemos armas! ¡No tenemos armas! - OW – ", but John knew better than to turn around and see what had happened.

"I think so too," John said sarcastically, and a man with a greasy ponytail, a string vest and a fresh cut above his eye punched John in the face pretty much out of nowhere.

John staggered back into Jones, but didn't fall. His mouth began to fill with blood, the coppery taste spilling over his tongue as the _thump-thump_ race of his misaligned heart began to climb up-tempo, faster and faster. He spat a blob of crimson out, turning his head to one side to keep it away from his vest-front. "That wasn't friendly," he complained.

"_That_ was for my grandmother, you piece of shit," the man with the greasy ponytail snarled, drawing back his fist – John saw now the glint of some scarred and scraped brass knuckles – and against his shoulders Jones sagged in wordless exasperation.

"Who the hell have you killed _now_?" Jones hissed.

"Would you believe me if I said no one?"

"No."

"Thought not. Sabes que hay una bestia en alguna parte?" John raised his voice, blood swilling and pooling behind his teeth. The adrenaline numbed the pain a bit, but he was still pretty sure he'd taken a chunk out of the side of his own tongue when he was hit. "Podría estar dondequiera. Ahora."

"Whatever it is you're saying to them, please stop," Jones's weary entreaty had barely reached John's ears before Brass Knuckles Guy flashed out his fist again, catching John a tidy one in the ear; John let the gun drop completely from his hand and gave Brass Knuckles an inviting, bloody smile. Next time that fist came near him he would have it by the fucking wrist. He'd break the guy's elbow. Very fucking simple. Then it would all be over.

There was an _oof_ of expelled air and a thump behind him, and the warm, solid pressure of Jones's back against his was removed, sliding downwards to the ground, nearly knocking him off his feet as it crashed into the back of his legs.

The word '_shit_' ran through John's mind waving its hands, but he didn't utter it – he spread his arms a little wider and gave the scowling faces a smile tinged with more than a little desperation. What he actually said was, "We could have a nice, friendly chat about this – "

Brass Knuckles took another swing at him. John seized his wrist in mid-air with both hands and gave the man's arm a vicious twist, yanking it up and round behind the guy's own back until he heard a shoulder pop out. Brass Knuckles grunted in pain.

"_Right,_" John said, stepping carefully around Jones's inert body, Brass Knuckles caught in a murderous grip, "no one do anything hast-"

The object that collided with the back of his head was probably the butt of a gun, but it came so fast and so hard that all John really knew was that it, briefly, hurt. It snipped a neat hole in his consciousness, as effective as general anaesthetic but a thousand times nastier.

* * *

Such was John's _colourful_ life thus far that when the first thing he experienced on regaining the waking world was shackles at his wrists and his own armpits very close to his face, his hands dangling numb up in space, he wasn't even a little confused. The irons were obviously bolted straight to the wall, with no chains to allow any movement, but his legs – ah, his legs were completely free. Sloppy, sloppy. John inhaled. Oh, yeah, this was some form of prison, the smell of stale piss was rarely if ever wrong, and his head ached and his wrists were sore; he opened his eyes.

He was bolted to a wall in a low-ceilinged room whose walls were green with sludge, a single, lazy light-bulb burning in the middle and no bloody windows; opposite was a heavy metal door with a closed sliding hatch at face level; far to his left, on a perpendicular wall to him, was an empty set or two of the same shackles that held him, and to his right …

"Just when I thought you couldn't get any nicer to look at …" John smirked. Jones was slumped in a similar position to he, his arms stretched above his head into rusty-looking iron wall-brace shackles, his suit muddy and torn, his face grazed, his gaze fixed on some uninteresting spot on the unhygienic floor.

"Oh God," Jones grunted. "When are you going to give it a rest?"

"Just making conversation." Sadly it was impossible to shrug with his arms wrenched upwards as they were, or he would have done, and added to the hurt expression tenfold.

"Is it worth me telling you it's your fault we're here or can we take that as read?" Jones said in the kind of tired voice that suggested he'd already lost his temper several times while John was knocked out and had simply run out of energy to be angry with anymore. Disappointing, John thought. He did have such an attractive spark to him when he was cross.

"How'd you figure that?" John peered at his feet. They hadn't taken his boots. "There were quite a _lot_ of them – I know I'm brilliant and everything but I'm not sure that I was supposed to fight them all without any help and win – "

"You killed that man's grandmother," Jones said in a low, flat voice, "I don't want to know what possible reason you thought you had, but they've mentioned it a few times while kicking the door very hard." He gave an apparently involuntary full-body shudder of probable disgust. "In English, which I imagine was for my benefit."

John made a surprised face. It was usually impossible to work out how long he'd been unconscious, as unlike sleep there was no sense of time passing, but he didn't _feel_ like it'd been long. "How long have I – "

"Long enough."

"So you believe them?"

Jones stared straight at him with cold eyes and a scrape over his cheek and temple and said in the same dead voice as before, "Go on. Deny it was you."

"Can't. That'd be lying. Lying is naughty." It was also phenomenally easy – the journey between truth and fantasy had always been simple for John, easier than things like trying to pull together a meal on his own, or remembering that people weren't objects – but sometimes telling the truth had more amusing or interesting effects.

"And for once I believe you," Jones muttered, averting his face. "That is exactly the kind of fucked up thing you do."

"She wouldn't give me directions," John said sulkily.

Jones looked like he was about to say something but thought better of it. The silence stretched on for long enough for John to get bored and fidgety – at least thirty seconds – and he began to notice a very insistent itch on his nose.

"You know he's not going to come and rescue you," he said, trying to rattle the shackles. They were screwed in _very_ tightly.

"Mickey?"

"You know who I mean," John grinned. "Captain Hero Trousers." It was an empty grin, but he knew the effect it had was greater than not doing it.

"Jack has nothing to do with this," Jones said stiffly.

"Of course not. Can't see him rushing in when there's someone else to do the job," John braced his back against the wall. One of his vertebrae ground painfully against another – someone'd obviously given him a good hard kick or two while he was out, and John himself would've done just the same. "You know he doesn't love you," he added, as though he was remarking on the weather.

"Shut up."

"Oh, I mean, he _cares_, don't get me wrong, whoever hypnotised some unfitting morals onto Jack Harkness did that much," John continued, giving Jones a very serious look as he tried to get comfortable against the wall, "but I don't think he _especially_ gives a toss. I mean, think how many other people he's seen come and go … live and die …"

"Shut up."

"I've known him a very long time – " John added, grinning to himself. His fingers were going numb.

"You knew him a long time _ago_," Jones corrected, once more turning his face away. "You don't know anything about him _now_."

"He's still him. I tell you, the only reason – the only difference between you and 'Jack' and Gwen and Jack is that he's probably - _probably_ \- not fucking her. I would be, but he's … well, he might be. Probably. That's all. He thinks of you all the same way, doesn't he?" John licked his lips and stared at Jones from under his eyelashes, letting the smirk grow and grow despite the pain in his mouth. "Just Jack's obedient little soldiers."

"SHUT. UP." Jones had gone red in the face now; John calculated it wouldn't take much more goading to get him to start trying to kick John from over there.

He poked again at the exposed nerve. "It's so sad to see you deluding yourself like this."

"_I'm_ not the delusional one," Jones snapped. "He doesn't fucking care about _you_."

"Oh I know he doesn't love _me_," John said lightly, though the admission burned a spear of ice through his guts and up into his heart and on up to almost freeze the words, sick and sore and torturous, from funnel of his throat. "He's got it bad for _someone_, any idiot can see that, and it's not me. But it's not you either." He leant his head on his upper arm and yawned. "Don't _think_ it's Gwen though …"

"SHUT. UP. Shut up shut _up_." Jones kicked out at him but, owing to his shackles, couldn't quite reach.

"He still talk in his sleep? Mention any names?" John asked, trying to sound solicitous. That was a good attack, he thought, reminding Jones that he'd been there too _and_ putting the wind up him about this mysterious fucking Other.

"_Not yours_."

"I should think not, it'd take him all week to mumble the whole thing." John grimaced. "Oh, really _has_ got you swallowing the line, hasn't he?"

"Shut up."

"You know he used to be a conman?" John said, tucking his legs as far out of the way as he could. "He can lie just as well as I do. Bet he has, too. Him and me, we used to pull some amazing scams. It's that smile of his – " which was unwise of him to mention, because that just twisted _him_ up inside and probably had no effect on Jones whatsoever.

Indeed, the beet-faced Welsh ball of rage simply sighed like a steam-engine and said in a shaky voice, "What _exactly_ are you trying to achieve?"

"Me?" John tried to sound more startled and hurt than he actually felt. "Just some friendly advice."

"Oh _please_."

"I'm serious. I think you're a lot like me – "

"You think _very, very wrong._"

_I know you're a fucking possessive, obsessive, easily-hurt psycho because I know what they look like, and I see one whenever I look in the mirror,_ John thought, but he didn't say it. He shoved the thought down under all the mental roadblocks he'd carefully assembled over the course of many years, and said with half-closed eyes, "Alright, I'll be honest with you."

"That'll be the bloody day." Jones pressed the back of his head against the cellar wall. His face was once again very pale under the dim light, all the furious blood drained from it again.

"I was trying to get you pissed off enough to break those restraints," John said without a trace of a grin. It wasn't strictly true – he'd _started_ just pushing Jones's buttons for the petty sulky hell of it, as usual, but the thought _had_ occurred to him after a while.

"_WHAT?_"

"Well, you're stronger than me," John pointed out. It was not a fact he was fond of, but being shorter and often slighter than most men around was something he'd had plenty of time to get used to; in the _right_ time era, in the right places, it had a psychological effect that simply couldn't be beaten or bought. Here, of course, in the historical backwaters at the birthplace of mankind, before his family's troublesome ancestors had ever been escorted away from the place, it meant nothing. "And I – "

He didn't get to finish. There was a clang and a rattle, and the heavy door swung inwards.

"Ay!," John shouted before anyone even came into view, "Ay!! ¡Tienes el individuo incorrecto! ¡Era el individuo en el juego!"

"Shut up, John," Jones sighed.

The men who entered paid no attention to him anyway; there were three of them, Brass Knuckles mercifully nowhere to be seen, and they were dragging something between two of them while the third covered Jones and John with an – unnecessary – gun. The 'something' was quite plainly a person, and as they thrust that person at the wall to John's left and screwed his unresisting wrists into the wall shackles and left him, head lolling onto his chest like a drunk's, it became very plain that the person was Mickey.

One of the men aimed a kick at John's knee as he left. It didn't bite hard enough to really damage him but it hurt enough.

"Well," John said philosophically as the lock clunked back into place, "there goes our fucking rescue."

"I wonder where K-9 is … " Jones murmured.

"Bollocks to K-9, what good has _that_ ever done?"

"More than you," Jones said with the same prim tone the robot bloody always bloody adopted.

"_What_? All it ever does is blather about 'insufficient data', get stuck on carpets and BREAK!" John spluttered, insulted in spite of himself. Coming second to a robot dog was a little more than anyone's ego should be expected to take. "I had to carry that box of cack up _stairs_."

"At least K-9 doesn't _lie_."

"What good is that?" John yelped.

"Will you please shut up," Mickey groaned, lifting his head only slightly. He had an impressive blue-black bruise distorting one eye. "Both of you. That's - _ow_ \- that's an order."

"Back to Plan A, I suppose," John said, ignoring him, "so, anyway. I'm just saying, Jones, that Jack fucking Harkness really doesn't _do_ love, okay?"

"John," Mickey moaned, just about raising his head. "Shut up."

"You're wrong," Jones growled, glaring at John. The colour was rising in his cheeks again.

"FINE," John snapped, surprised to find his own heart-rate climbing, and the slight vibrations in his vision intensifying.

"Shut up," Mickey repeated. "Ianto, ignore him." His voice was thick with something, slightly slurred, maybe a head injury or a fat tongue. John's own tongue ached.

"And how the hell would you even know?" Jones asked, raising his own voice. "And why would you give a shit?"

"I. DON'T."

"FINE."

"John," Mickey said sharply, "leave him alone. Ianto, stop letting him get to you." He glared at them both like some sort of battered holy mediator, the bruise lending him an uncharacteristically malevolent cast. "In fact … ugh, concentrate … John, you _must_ have been in prison at least once, how did you get out?"

"He never even mentions you," Jones spat.

"You're breaking my heart," John told him.

"JOHN. IANTO. CONCENTRATE. For fuck's sake!"

John left the whole argument alone very reluctantly; admittedly it was odds on that he would snap before Jones and he couldn't even figure out why, but there was also the change that Jones would want to throttle him badly enough to break his wrists against the irons and slither out of those restraints. Quite what help he was going to be while crippled John hadn't really considered – long-term planning wasn't, he thought defensively, his forte. He was a man of _action_.

Jones clammed up and restricted himself to glaring daggers and chainsaws at John, which was downright adorable; John tried to remember when he'd last been in prison.

Eventually he said, "Bloody backwards century."

"_Think_, John," Mickey said in an exasperated voice.

"No, that really is the problem." John sighed. "_Before_ I've been in places … prisons … so fucking cocky about their security systems they just let me walk about my cell and I had the chance to break out – "

"And here they're not taking any chances," Mickey finished dryly.

John waved his fingers at him sarcastically. "I'm not a magician."

"You fancy being a dead non-magician?"

He had a point, which annoyed John so much that he couldn't really think of an answer for a while. The trouble was it'd been too long since he last got laid. Nearly a whole _week_. There was nothing like being backed-up and frustrated for clouding the thoughts –

And _that_ was it.

"Ay! Maricónes!" he shouted.

"What're you doing?" Mickey groaned.

"Getting us out of here," John hissed. "Ay! Ay!"

"Callate!" Someone kicked the door.

"Well, _this_ is a brilliant plan," Jones muttered.

"I know what I'm doing," hissed John, who didn't, exactly, but wanted to try anyway. He just knew that, in his experience, anyone could be persuaded to at least move him somewhere else if he shouted for long enough. "Oye!! No puedo respirar!! Oye! Oye! Por favor, necesito un poco de aire, ¡Haré cualquier cosa! – "

"Callate, pendejo," shouted the voice on the other side of the door, and there was another bang. John could hear tinny, distant talking out there as well, which was weird but not enough for him to waste thought on.

"¡Diré cualquier cosa!" John yelled, "Sé dónde guardan el dinero. Le llevaré al dinero."

"I think he just blamed us for something," Jones said to Mickey.

"Shh," John said. He raised his voice. "Haré cualquier cosa que su quiere! Chuparé su pinga."

There was a long silence. John breathed in through his mouth – the damp air stung his tongue – and he was about to start yelling again when the hatch in the door slid slowly open.

"Maricón," the man on the other side of it spat.

"Por favor," John whined, "cualquier cosa que su quiere. No soy como estos otros hombres. Son asesinos malvados. No quise trabajar con ellos.…"

"There he goes again," Mickey murmured. "He definitely just mentioned us."

"Adelantado," John pleased. "No soy nadie. Déjeme por favor respirar. Haré cualquier cosa que usted quisiera que hiciera. – "

The lock clunked. The door swung open. John caught a glimpse of a TV and a table in the room beyond, and one man entered. John didn't' really recognise him from the circle of faces in the street, which might be an advantage of inexperience or might simply have been a flicker of malfunction in his brain; the drooling spectre of useless insanity haunted his bloodline like a physical presence, after all.

John gave the man – who had a scratched face, a greying and greasy ponytail, pristine jeans and a dirty vest – his very best pleading look, all big eyes and helpless mouth, and said, "Por favor, haré cualquier cosa que usted quiere. apenas sálgame de aquí. No soy como esos dos hombres."

The guy spat off to one side, but said nothing. For a moment no one moved, and John began to wonder if he was going to get a kicking for making a noise instead of the easy ride out he'd been banking on, but at last Grey Ponytail produced a key from his back pocket – a key with no ring – and undid the flat bar that held John's arms up against the wall.

He was already so stiff that they fell awkwardly to his lap – there was no question of disarming the bastard as he might have done when he was younger; John watched the gun holster on Grey Ponytail's waistband slide along its belt as Grey Ponytail grabbed him by the throat and pulled him to his feet. It was a move John used to favour himself – it kept the prisoner's hands scrabbling at this throat in a desperate bid for air and left the captor one free hand to grab at their gun, knife, or blaster – and he appreciated the intelligence behind it.

"Usted es muy agradable," he choked, as Grey Ponytail backed him out of the cellar.

"What the fuck are you _doing_?" Jones hissed.

"Escaping," John murmured, and waved his fingers. "Bye bye."

The door slammed shut on their furious faces and John found himself immediately kicked back down to his knees again. He noticed the table, the shelf with the TV on it blaring some kind of soap opera, but he didn't really take them in.

"_Don't. Move_" Grey Ponytail said in very thick and accented English. He kept his hand on John's throat. "Hands behind back. Sosténgase sobre sus cargadores con sus manos, cabrón."

John did as he was told with the nearest he could get to a pleasant and ingratiating smile. Grey Ponytail undid his ridiculously huge belt buckle and fly.

"Okay," John said cheerfully, though if he was honest – unlikely, of course – he'd not seen many such unimpressive and badly-washed cocks _voluntarily_ before.

"No teeth," warned Grey Ponytail, releasing John's throat and grabbing his hair instead.

Grey Ponytail clearly didn't deserve John's best moves, but John had a certain measure of personal pride to consider (enough to fill a black hole and overflow) and so he got to work: his tongue, the roof of his mouth, his throat, his saliva, and, despite the warnings, the very very edges of his teeth, all of them working like machine parts put together by a perverted genius to drive this idiot to the brink of a cross-eyed internal fireworks-display.

John's throat worked, Grey Ponytail's hands on his head, his ears straining for the alteration in the man's heavy breaths as his own hands edged gently inside his boot.

Grey Ponytail made some unintentional mumble of appreciation and John whipped his arm round like a striking rattlesnake.

Several things happened very quickly:

The blade of John's knife performed an elegant, swift, and total penectomy, just missing John's lips.

John spat out the bloody lump at Grey Ponytail's chest and shot up to clap a hand over his mouth and douse the agonised scream.

He swung himself behind the bleeding, twitching man and laid the edge of his knife over the man's throat, yanking Grey Ponytail's head back with nothing more than pressure to his mouth.

John put his mouth to Grey Ponytail's ear and watched the blood soaking the man's jeans, pumping out like a burst water-main from the terrible wound he had inflicted.

And he whispered, "I could just let you bleed to death like this," his hand pressing Grey Ponytail's teeth together like a clamp on his jaw. John's heart was pounding great waves of golden light through his body. His lungs were swollen with the scent of terror and pain. "I could hold your head and make you watch yourself die," he went on, trying to keep the quiver of joy from his voice. "I would _love_ to. You'll never know how good this feels."

John licked his lips and murmured softly, "But I'm a busy man. One thing, though –" he jerked on Grey Ponytail's teeth like the bit of a disobedient horse, " – for future reference - un hombre que tiene gusto de hombres de chupar su pinga es también un Maricón."

He jerked the knife through Grey Ponytail's neck and stood back, dripping with red from the tip of the blade, as the man spasmed and bucked the blood from his body, twisting himself into immobility down to the floor.

_Now to get the fuck out of here_, John thought as _The Ninth Dover Cliff_ thundered through every nerve, stooping to seize up the dead man's piece. It was as shitty as the last gun he'd stolen; obviously the gangs of Curundu were not well-equipped operations. Shoddy and pathetic. _And … gone!_ John thought, but he had the key in his hand and his knife back in its boot.

"Oh, fuck it," he grumbled, shoving the enormous door back open with his foot.

"What was – " Mickey began, looking up. He clocked the blood on John's clothes, and exchanged a rehash of the same old _ Do You Want To [Ask] Him / I Don't Fancy The Truth_ look with Jones as John bent to free him from the wall. "Y'know," Mickey said, getting up with difficulty, "I'm not going to ask."

"Good idea," John agreed, handing him the key with a flourish. "I expect sexual favours and vast financial recompense for this act of selfless nobility," he added in a distracted voice, keeping an eye on the door.

"Except away," Jones said acidly, as Mickey unlocked his shackles.

"I hate you both," John remarked. "You're an awful boss and I quit." He checked the doorway again. So far there was no sign of a response. Grey Ponytail was giving up on his posthumous mission to paint the vestibule room crimson, and on the TV a woman with tiny eyebrows and silicon breasts was expressing the disappointed discovery that: "you're _not_ a doctor, are you?". As far as John was concerned this constituted 'all is well'.

He helped Mickey to haul Jones to his feet, and took the lead past the soggy corpse of their late guard.

John didn't bother to turn around to check, but he was pretty sure it was Jones who gagged at the sight and smell (Grey Ponytail had of course shat himself in his death throes) of his handiwork.

"Did you _have_ to?" Mickey asked with more censure than horror.

"We're _out_," John said, shouldering the next door open carefully. "Don't complain about my methods."

"I don't want to have to keep sending 'John went off on another spree' reports back to Three," Mickey explained. The corridor stretched away ahead of John for far further than any ghetto basement ought to.

"So don't," he suggested. John paused and counted doors – two, one obviously leading to stairs and the other secured with an impressive number of bolts and padlocks. A remark fell out of his mouth while he was peering at it. "Can you even _spell_ 'spree'?"

"Oh fuck you," Mickey sighed.

Anything behind a door like _that_ had to be worth a small fortune. Possibly even quite a large one. John took a deep breath. He should have left the Moral Force chained up; he should have taken the goods and gone. Since when had any 'good' deed of his gone unpunished? Jack, then Gray, Jack again … then again, maybe it was just Boeshane Sand People who were the ungrateful fucking pricks …

"John, get a move on," Jones whispered. He sounded revolted and impatient.

John stepped aside, pressing himself against the doorframe, his eyes crawling hungrily over the locked and bolted door. "You go ahead," John said, barely shaping the words.

"Wait," Mickey said. "What's down there?"

"Nothing. The stairs are that way – " John gestured with his elbow.

"I think," Mickey said, nodding to the heavily-secured door, "we should check that out."

"We need to get _out_ of here," Jones insisted. "Before someone comes."

"If these people have that … whatever it is … we need to do something about it," Mickey reminded him. "We have orders." His Official Bastard Voice faded and he added in rather more normal tones, "and besides, they have K-9. I'm not leaving my dog."

Once again John found himself exchanging a What The Fuck look with Jones, but Mickey had already slipped past them and down the corridor, moving with wraith-like stealth that took John somewhat by surprise.

"God's sake," Jones muttered, and followed their 'leader', smoothing down his ruined tie with both hands. John was pretty sure he'd worked out what that little tic meant by now.

Mickey squatted by the door, working something into one of the padlocks – one already lay unlocked on the floor.

"I could shoot the locks," offered John, itching to get inside the room and get his hands on what was surely a fucking _mountain_ of cocaine or something equally valuable.

"Save your bullets," Mickey grunted, yanking another lock open, "they'll be down here in seconds if they hear a shot – "

"They'll be down here in seconds _anyway_," Jones insisted. "We have to _leave_. Mickey. Come on."

"If they've got K-9 in here – " Mickey shook his head, jiggling another lock loose.

"Why the fuck would they keep that useless tin can behind all these locks?" John wondered aloud.

"Much as I really, really hate to say it, John's got a point," Jones said, passing his hands over his dirty, scraped face. "Mickey, please, come on. We _have_ to go."

"Stop talking and keep an eye on that corridor," Mickey said, very short and very blunt. Another bolted _thunked_ back, another padlock landed on the floor.

"Mickey …" Jones began, but the last lock thumped undone and all three of them craned their necks as Mickey prodded the door open with his toe.

The room was mostly empty, but towards the back was – somewhat unexpectedly – a ramshackle selection of archaic hospital equipment John didn't recognise; tubes were involved, things with green LEDs, the sort of backwards crap they had in museums which even the most tiresomely nerdy of John's former Agency colleagues couldn't be bothered with on History Days. The stuff surrounded a large, dark, heaving shape which appeared to be breathing in a deep torpor, stuffed into a huge wire cage the size of a minivan. The tubes snaked in through the square mesh and disappeared into the shadowy shape.

"Okay," Mickey said, putting his hands on his head. "That's … _weird_."

"Welcome to Torchwood," Jones muttered very dryly indeed.

"What the … " John grumbled, "That's _it_?"

Something above their heads made a rumbling noise, and as one all three of them stared at the ceiling.

"Can we _please_ get ourselves out of here?" Jones murmured.

"What about K-9?"

"Bugger K-9," John suggested, already out the door.

He just about caught Jones saying in a soothing voice, "We can come back for K-9, and to put that … whatever it is … out of its misery, but we've _got_ to go."

John was already at the foot of the stairs, gun in hand, knife in boot, ears pricked and nerves tingling, fizzing like … what was it called … _Eat-Thru_. Illegal on four planets. The stairs were empty, but he could hear voices close by, male voices, and he could make out "Europeos" and "cabrón asesino" and "Mate a ese hijo de puta" among the words that came seeping through the uppermost door. "Kill that son of a bitch" was practically his nickname in several galaxies and several hundred languages; it wasn't exactly a surprise. John thought he recognised the particular timbre of Brass Knuckles's voice amid the talk as it drifted away.

"Out as quietly as we can," Mickey whispered, coming up behind him like a ghost.

"Or I could just shoot them and we can go and find your stupid dog," John offered. He of course meant 'where they're keeping their drugs' rather than K-9, but it wasn't like they couldn't do both at once if everyone else in the building was dead. It was a very practical plan.

"Or you could shut up and let someone who isn't insane do the thinking," Jones instructed from further back. John conceded this point with alacrity; he had no idea how many bullets he had left but it was almost certainly less than the men upstairs.

John edged the door at the head of the steep stairs open very carefully, just a fraction of an inch. He counted the breaths of only one man – caught a glimpse of sleeveless blank shirt through the crack – and had his whole person through the door on the second _thud_ of his heart; he smacked Black Shirt on the skull with the butt of his shitty gun at the same time, and the greasy gangster went down like a Thai prostitute.

Best to make sure, though – as he beckoned back to Mickey and Jones, John dropped to a squat and picked his knife delicately from his boot. The Wussy No-Kill Element came carefully into the room in time to see him pull the blade back _out_ of the unconscious Black Shirt's lungs.

"_John_," Mickey growled. "There was no need."

"Better safe than sorry," John shrugged.

"I don't think that's quite what the proverb-makers had in mind," Jones sighed, stepping around the draining corpse.

There was a window a few yards away; John came to it in a crouching run and checked the rubbish-filled yard it led to. Bright sun bounced off rusting hulks of cars, but no one threatening moved. "All clear."

"_Finally_," Jones said, and without much further ado they dropped through the window and into the blinding light.

"I should have grabbed that guy's gun too," John realised as they moved swiftly away from the long, ancient-looking pale brick house. The building was draped in vivid foliage and rotting red flags in equal measures. "We're underarmed."

"And we're not exactly inconspicuous," Mickey observed. Already, several children had come out of their homes and hiding places to stare at them in silence. "Faster. Come on. Shift."

* * *

_Somehow_ \- John supposed at least one of the others had an actual sense of direction as they'd had their phones taken – they made it back to the hotel without being caught up with or, even more surprisingly, _arrested_ for looking like a psychopath and a brace of tramps. The receptionist in the hotel lobby merely sniggered at them as they entered, bedraggled and exhausted and battered-looking, but the guests checking in boggled quite freely.

John gave them an imperious wave and a lecherous grin; this blood-spattered display of carnality was apparently enough to jolt them back to a sense of eyes-lowered propriety.

Even more delightfully Mickey _and_ Jones were by this point so tired that neither of them bothered to reprimand him for it, so John blew his adoring audience a kiss as he slunk into the lift behind them.

"We need to figure out a strategy," Mickey croaked as they fanned out in the deserted left. John leaned hard on the mirrored wall and checked his mouth. It was covered in flakes of dried blood.

"We _need_ a wash, some _sleep_, and a meal," Jones said firmly, "before anything else happens."

"We need a rocket-launcher," John said. "Fuck strategy."

"Subtle, John," Jones said with what sounded a lot like a sneer. One of _John's_ sneers, at that.

"Fuck subtle, too."

"There's a surprise."

"Will you two _stop_ it?" Mickey stared at the ceiling. "We have to get K-9 back and find out what the hell is going on with that … thing … in the cellar."

"It looked like they were keeping it alive," Jones suggested. The lift doors opened; a middle-aged couple looked in and thought better of it, and the doors closed again.

"Oh but it looked perfectly fucking healthy while it was trying to _kill_ us," John observed. "You know, always assuming that the giant furry thing in the basement was the same giant furry thing that – "

"Maybe you shot it."

"I missed." It rankled so much that John could taste the disappointed bile in the back of his throat. He didn't like being a bad shot, ever; no matter who knew it or didn't know it, it brought the entire Cousinry into some nebulous shame.

"Novel."

"Shut up or say something conceivably useful," Mickey snapped as they reached their floor. "Both of you."

"I've already _got_ a rocket-launcher," John exclaimed. Well, he sort of did. It needed a little work and more fire-extinguishers.

"So have I," Mickey said with a surprising smile. "Let's hope it doesn't have to come to that."

"Oh God," Jones said weakly, "I'm going to die."

Two hours later none of them were any more rested than they had been when they dragged themselves back into the hotel, but John and Jones had drunk a _lot_ of coffee and Mickey had taken some medication and no one stank anymore. They sat in the large, deserted breakfast room of the hotel, demolishing something billed as a continental breakfast (which continent John couldn't ascertain but it involved more fruit than he was willing to consider), two of them vibrating slightly.

"You're not really intending to go in all guns blazing," Jones said. His new tie was iridescent blue and made him look like a cross between a bank manager and something John wanted to fuck very badly.

"Don't worry," Mickey assured him, "you're driving, you stay in the jeep unless we really need you."

"_Jeep_?" John and Jones said almost in time.

"I made some calls."

"Oi, you're infringing on my territory now," John complained.

"If you stopped traumatising your contacts they might want to do business with you more than once," Mickey said with another unexpected and annoyingly smug smile.

_I hope they blow your stupid robot up,_ John thought sulkily, _or sell it for part. To a monkey_.

"Your contacts turn up anything else?" Jones asked with frosty politeness. John could only guess that he wasn't pleased with being surprised.

"A few things. John, how're you for causing a nice big distracting explosion?" Mickey paused in the middle of constructing a cheese and ham sandwich with slices of fruit loaf in place of bread. "Why am I even asking …"

"Play to my strengths," John agreed, feeling better already. "How many casualties?"

"_None_."

"Why must you spoil everything?" John flicked a grape dismally off the edge of the table. "We were doing so _well_. Bonding. Don't piss on my dreams."

Jones stared at him over the rim of his many-th coffee. "Be quiet. No one is bonding with you."

"Huge explosion," Mickey repeated – the words were music to John's ears; it wasn't like he could really _help_ it if a couple of kids or a dog or something got in the way of the blast, could he? Making things go up in smoke and high temperatures at speed wasn't a precise science – "and John and I will break back into their base and get K-9. Once we've got him safe, we can get that alien out of their basement." Nothing about killing it, John noted.

"And I'm going to stay in the jeep?" Jones enquired. He popped a painkiller out of the foil strip in front of him; John _had_ thought he couldn't possibly need them anymore, what with the stench of infection being all gone, but when he'd ransacked Jones's luggage on alighting from the liner he'd found it pretty much stuffed with them.

"We're going to need to get out quickly," Mickey said, "and I know you hate shooting."

"Stun gun."

"No range. Do you really want to go back in there?"

"No," Jones agreed, gulping down his pill with more of the mutant-strength coffee, "but have you considered how conspicuous a jeep is going to be? In Curundu and … where cars are chicken coops?"

John helped himself to Mickey's fruitloaf sandwich. It was unexpectedly tasty. Mickey slapped the back of his hand without looking at him, and snatched the sandwich back.

"_Yes_, that's why you have to stay in it – so no one nicks it – " Mickey dragged his plate out of John's reach.

"And driving through the streets of Curundu in a fucking great jeep isn't going to sort of alert them to our arrival hours before we get there," Jones said, straightening his tie.

"It will be _fine_," Mickey snapped.

"More explosions solve everything," John said, giving Jones a poke under the table with his toe. This was after all old wisdom.

Jones stared into his empty coffee cup. "Did I do something bad in a previous life?"

"I have a couple of surprises up my sleeve," Mickey said, leaning forwards to give Jones a reassuring pat on the forearm – Jones leaned back out of reach. "Don't worry. Now," he added, taking a mouthful of his bizarre sandwich from the opposite side to the one John had bitten, "so far we don't really know the layout of the building too well, just that the basement has three known rooms and one of those is housing our alien – "

"And will be even better-secured than before, now that you've picked all the locks," Jones pointed out, jerking his legs away from John's foot, "stop _touching_ me."

"More explosions," John reiterated with his most endearing smile.

"From initial recon," Mickey said, pulling out a rather scratched PDA and turning it so they could all see the grainy, watermarked photo, "it's a three-storey building. We know enough about the basement. That still leaves us with too many possibilities."

"I told you, just kill them _all_ and we'll have plenty of time to find your bloody dog," John explained. Why on earth or any other planet this plan wasn't getting proper consideration was beyond him; it wasn't exactly even _very_ morally corrupt, was it? Even Jack probably wouldn't object to massacring a few dozen drug dealers and general Bad Men. Probably. Unless he'd gone completely soft in the head.

"_Fortunately_," Mickey said, talking over him, "I managed to track K-9's communication signal despite not being able to contact it, so I have him narrowed down to the western end of the building, around ground level at the moment."

"Alright," Jones said meditatively, "where's this very undercover jeep?"

The jeep turned out to be not nearly so conspicuous as Three's terminally showy black number, nor anything like as modern; a beaten and dusty hulk of an ex-army vehicle with one mirror secured in place with orange bailer twine. Jones greeted it with mild horror, but Mickey seemed delighted. "See, not so much a sore thumb as you thought. Plenty of those still knocking around."

"It's still being driven by a fucking undertaker," John said, scrabbling up onto the middle seat.

"Touch me while I'm driving and I will electrocute you," Jones said calmly as he settled himself onto the seat.

"Promise?"

"Let's go get my dog," Mickey instructed, and with a bit of effort Jones managed to shove the engine into life.

* * *

Incognito or not, the people of Curundu who weren't otherwise occupied on a Saturday afternoon came out to watch the jeep bounce and scrape over potholes in the road. Jones pulled up a 'block' (although that was hardly the right term, suggesting a more geometrical collection of housing than there actually was) from the house and let them out.

"Be quick," Mickey told John, "and get down to the cellar as soon as you've finished." He raced away, boots crunching on god-knows-what like a man chewing tinfoil.

John snorted and flashed his teeth at a child that had stopped poking a dead frog to watch him. He didn't even attempt to make it a friendly smile. "Come on," he muttered, jerking his head, "let's go make a horrible mess."

The child – a girl of about four – stared at him for a while, shrugged, and went back to poking her festering frog with a car aerial.

After walking out of sight of the jeep John ducked around behind an improvised hen coop which also for some reason contained motorbike parts and a rabbit, and pulled the bag off his shoulders. Everything he needed to make one hell of a big noise and huge mess … if he wasn't 'allowed' to blow up civilians then he was fucking well going to make some crispy fried poultry at least …

He got to work. Timers had never really been his hot point, but aside from that John had all the glories of a well-spent and well-funded youth blowing up anything that could be nailed down (bears, for example, and slaves, and one of his father's former business partners), topped with a couple of decades of explosive and 'trained' work with the benighted Agency. The bomb took shape as easily and quickly as a rod whittled from a twig, as if it had been waiting in the wires all along.

"Qué está haciendo?"

John looked up. Another small child – a boy this time – was watching him with open-mouthed curiosity, a stick in his hand. "Chingado un pollo, ¿qué mira como estoy intentando hacer?" John said coolly. "Venga aquí y sostenga este alambre."

The boy did so. John peered at him. He could have been anything from five to ten – John had never really been that interested in kids unless they could be sold or ransomed – and was wearing an orange t-shirt which had seen many better days. His hair was thick, his eyes huge, and his fingers grubby.

"Cuál es tu nombre?" John asked, getting up.

"Juan."

"Verdad? Yo tambien. Juan, Necesito un favor." John brushed dirt off his knees and checked his new, ugly, borrowed watch. "Sostenga esos dos alambres al lado de uno a y no vaya dondequiera. Voy a ver a mis amigos. ¿Estaré detrás rápidamente, muy bien?" He patted the top of the chicken coop. "Haga esto, y le daré veinte dólares."

"Sí." Juan didn't sound as excited as John felt he ought to, but there were more important things on his mind. John flashed the kid a reassuring smile and sauntered off towards the house.

It wasn't until he was pressed against the outer wall of that ominous and strangely-decorated building that John slipped his hand into his pocket and pressed the detonation switch with all the relish of a starving rat presented with a sackful of rum-soaked grain. "Valuable lesson," he muttered, as the world on the other side of the 'block' erupted into a giant ball of smoke and falling rock, body parts and flying car fragments, "_always_ look a gift horse in the fucking mouth, Juan."

John reached up and grabbed the windowsill above his head; as men came clattering out of the doors to the building he hauled himself in through the window, rolled off the sill onto the floorboards, and came to a premature halt against the very polished boots of – he looked up – of course. Brass Knuckles.

"_Tu_."

"Oh for fuck's sake," John complained, swinging his arm into the back of Brass Knuckles's knee cap. The gangster wobbled, but didn't fall – John, however, shot up like a Jack – a _John_ \- innabox, catching Brass Knuckles on the underside of his chin with his forehead.

There was an almighty _crack_.

As Brass Knuckles's head snapped back John finally got his hands on his gun and in three beats of his raging, surging heart had the muzzle against the gangster's jugular. The adrenaline was already spiking so hard that John could barely keep the gun still.

"Pendejo – "

"_Boring_," John said, pulling the trigger. "That's what you are. Dull."

He half-skipped through two rooms en route to the cellar door, once again liberally sprayed with someone else's blood. John wiped a fleck out of his eyelashes before it could clot his eye shut, and pulled the cellar door open.

Or at least, he tried to. It was locked.

"Fuck's! Sake!" John barked, shooting the lock. The door swung open gently, and – gun raised, blood thundering, eyes lit with the oft-remarked-upon light of inappropriate homicidal glee – John bounded down the stairs to the basement; two at a time, three at a time, taking the last five in a jump that knocked the bottom door open.

"¡Ahora salga y prometo no cráneo-chinga tu cadáver!" John bellowed, eyeballing the corridor. It _appeared_ to be deserted; he careened on down to the bolted and padlocked door.

John examined the locks: new padlocks, heavy bolts, one combination lock with eight digits – a determined gestured of security, that. It would take hours and hours to fiddle the locks even if he was as good as it as Mickey, which – annoyingly – he knew he wasn't. John tried to think about the problem sensibly. Someone probably had keys, and the combination. All John had to do was find him and drag him down here. Simple. That's what Jack would do, right?

He turned away from the door.

"Fuck it," John said.

He shot the hinges out; he put his shoulder to the door and heaved. It shifted under his weight, ground against the floor, and grated against its own locks. John stepped back a few paces, tucked the gun down the back of his jeans, and took a run at it; the door groaned and shuddered like an orgasming housewife, something crunched in John's shoulder, and he fell headlong into the room.

The smell was strangely sweet, like stale vomit mixed with honey, and not what he would have expected of a dank basement full of medical equipment that only a bloody caveman would use. John got ungracefully to his feet and, with a grimace, popped his shoulder back into its socket; the anaesthetic properties of the adrenaline imbalance were one of the many reasons his family had never in their history seen fit to correct _that_ genetic defect.

In the gloomy light of a dim bulb and several spring-green LEDs all he could make out of the animal was that it was enormous, apparently unconscious, and that it was caged. John stepped up to the wires and peered in.

The shape remained indistinct despite all his squinting; John cast his mind back to the blurring of scenery that had preceded its appearances in the street, the way he'd been unable to figure out where it was coming from. If he looked at it … nope. From the … nope. But if he looked at it from the very corner of his eye it seemed like … some sort of fang-toothed bear-sized thing probably designed to deal with much colder weather. Something clear bubbled up through one of the tubes nearest John, and the machine it was connected to whirred, a fan churning.

"Are they _milking_ you or what?" John muttered.

The beast stirred, grunted, and made a noise which sounded like sleepy distress in any tongue. The sweet-sick/honey smell intensified, and John pulled on one of the tubes with dreamy indifference.

It popped out to the sound of a half-roar, half-whimper; the beast shuddered, something splattered on the floor by John's feet and the musk or scent became almost over-powering.

"What the …?"

John spun round at the voice, but it was only Mickey, picking his way over the fallen door, his face creased in near-comical confusion.

"What _is_ that?" Mickey covered his nose and mouth with his hand.

"I don't know. I've never seen one before." John stared into the cage. Once you got used to it the sickly stench was actually quite pleasant; he supposed though that it must be some sort of pain or fear response, maybe sweat or piss or whatever, because he'd smelt nothing of the sort in the street.

Mickey was feeling along the edge of the cage. "Is there a door?"

"I don't know, I haven't had time to look." John looked back at the blurry, hairy lump. "Where's the tin can?"

"On his way back to the jeep, under orders to zap anyone who tries to stop him and isn't either me or Ianto," Mickey said distractedly. He apparently didn't like the smell, or at least was talking as though something stank.

"That could be … interesting," John murmured, thinking of the little girl and her dead frog. Who wouldn't be distracted by that rattling old beeping box wheeling its way through the ghetto?

"Just to stun them – ah, there's the catch, at the back. No lock, though – "

"Torchwood procedure is to put captive non-sentient aliens out of their suffering if they can't be immediately returned to the Rift," Jones said from the doorway. John didn't have to look to know he'd probably got That Face on and if he wasn't folding his arms he fucking well sounded like he was.

"I thought I told you to guard the jeep?" Mickey asked, his hand on the cage door.

"Don't need to," Jones said in a short, tight voice. "No one's going to go near it."

"Are you _mad_?" Mickey snapped. "Of course they're going to nick a – "

"Everyone's gone to look at the bombsite," Jones said calmly. His calm sounded quite stretched, like there was going to be a fist flying out of it soon, which John was rather looking forwards to. "_Everyone_. The entirety of Curundu from the looks of things. A lot of very angry and upset people are gathered around shouting and crying because _someone_ was apparently not content with ruining people's livelihoods and decided he needed to explode a few _children_ too – "

"What?" John said, pulling out another tube. The beast growled and twitched. More of the clear fluid splashed onto the floor, and John's sense of dreamy detachment from events increased just a little. His fingers felt nice. "No, no. There was only _one_ kid."

"Get the door open," Mickey instructed, yanking the catch back. "Ianto, you can punch him in the face later. I'll hold your coat, but right now – are all the lines out?"

"Pretty much." John shoved the machines back from the cage with his foot, and steadied himself for the possibility of fighting off a maddened bear-thing.

"Torchwood policy," Jones began again.

"I don't give a flying fuck about Torchwood fucking policy," Mickey snapped, "I'm not killing it. I'm tired of killing things. There are plenty of bloody animals on this planet that eat people, why does _this_ one have to suffer for it? It doesn't know any better – JOHN, would you please – "

"I can't _believe_ you're taking his side!"

"I'm not taking anyone's fucking _side_, Ianto, I'm showing a little bloody mercy - _JOHN_, open the cage!"

John yanked the wiremesh door open and leapt back. The beast grunted, and twitched, and may or may not have rolled over. It didn't seem very interested or very conscious.

"We're going to have to carry it," Mickey muttered.

"Jones might be right," John said, eyeballing the alien's impressive and out-of-focus bulk with a sinking feeling. "It looks heavy and our gun-happy friends will be back soon."

"Oh yeah," Jones muttered, "_they're_ the gun-happy ones."

"Ianto," Mickey said, ignoring all this. "Get the jeep, get K-9, and get back here. I've figured this out. That dog," he said, shooting John a look John didn't like much, "can do a lot of things, and one of those is to help us get this lump up the stairs."

* * *

Getting the animal into the back of the jeep, even with K-9's tractor abilities ("WHAT?" John had shouted, "WHY DID NO ONE MENTION THIS? WHY DOESN'T ANYONE TELL ME ANYTHING?", and Jones had pointed in a sarcastic voice that when John stopped trying to sell _Mickey_ to slave traders they'd think about letting him know the important information about the robot), was a nightmare. Jones called it a Sisyphean task, and was made to regret this by Mickey and John repeatedly referring to it as a Syphilitic task for the next twenty minutes; John was forced to shoot someone in the face because he didn't have time to aim for somewhere less disturbing, and Jones was sick down the side of a door when he went to check the damage ("If that's what you call a 'clean kill' I never want to see a messy one," he grumbled, hoisting his end of the beast again), but they did manage to transfer its huge, hot, stinking body into the jeep in the end.

John collapsed on the floor in the back, half-under the huge, drooling weight of the animal, and started laughing as it moved an appendage to scratch itself. "Lazy fucking fucker."

"Okay," Mickey said, wiping his mouth – at least, that's what it looked like he was doing from John's rather unfeasible position. "We keep going this way – Ianto, can you see that, the screen's a bit scratched – and we should hit the jungles after about six hours."

"SIX?" John groaned. "I'm going to lose a leg to gangrene!"

"Shut up," Jones said pleasantly. "You're just going to turn it loose, then?"

"People do it with lions," Mickey said stubbornly.

"Not man-eating ones."

"I want to keep him," John said, scratching the beast behind what he hoped was its ear. "I'm going to call him Steve." The animal made a gurgling noise and the inside of the jeep took on the pungent odour of randy ox. "Look, he's happy!"

"We're not keeping it," Mickey sighed, banging the dash, or possibly the wall.

"Oh come on, Mickey, you've got that sodding robot ..." John scratched something underneath all the fangs, which was probably the alien's chin. Or might have been its genitals. It never paid to make anatomical assumptions about alien races.

"K-9 doesn't eat children," Jones said acidly.

"Yet another one of his many failings."

"Or, for that matter, _blow them up_."

"I refer you to my previous incredibly witty comeback."

"I hope it fucking eats you."

"Tell you what," Mickey said, sounding like he wanted to knock their heads together, "I'm going to call Jack. If this thing can get a signal. I'm going to call him, on the speaker, and I'm going to ask _him_ what he thinks we should do – "

"I'm sort of hoping 'pull Steve off John's legs' is going to be involved," John suggested. His foot had gone numb.

"I wouldn't count on it," Jones muttered.

There was a long and, for John, uncomfortable silence as the jeep bounced its away further out of the city limits, Steve drooled corrosively on John's jeans, and Mickey wrestled with whatever it was he had in the front.

"Jack?" Mickey asked, suddenly, and John found himself straining to hear a reply.

"—usy right now, Mickey, this had better be – "

"Always so pleased to hear from us," John muttered, stroking Steve's head contemplatively. "It's almost like we're these horrible cast-offs he can't stand to have around anymore. Oh, wait – "

"No, just you," Jones spat.

"Jack?" Mickey repeated. "Jack, we've got the … the alien, we're taking it out to release in the jungle."

"—lliant, was that all?"

"That's the alien that's been eating children in the Curundu and Santa Ana areas of Panama City," Jones elaborated reproachfully.

"No children in the jung-" Jack's voice crackled out for a moment. "—ssion brief."

"What?" Mickey asked, making obvious _shush_ motions at Jones as the jeep bounced over something.

"Up – States – town called Embargo," Jack said, "I'll send the details later. There's a –"

"Jack," Mickey thumped something John couldn't see. "You said something about an element of Time – "

"I don't know what's involved," Jack admitted, coming through a little louder, a little clearer, and making John's non-numb parts go horrible, "your future-self sent a message, I just followed what it said – "

"You did what?" Mickey sounded unfortunately like a strangled chook when he was truly startled, John noticed, giving Steve another scratch. Mickey's choked poultry noises were at least distracting.

"Mickey, hard though it may be for you grasp, I do actually trust you," Jack said with a sigh. "All I know now is that Embargo was the last on the list of the places you have to be. There's a motel. There is _definitely_ an element of Time involved, you were very insistent about it –" Jack's voice crackled out again, and John could hear Mickey repeatedly hitting the side of the thing that was supposed to be maintaining contact.

"—okay?"

"What?"

"—nto and John?"

"They're fine."

"I HAVE A FUCKING ALIEN BEAR ON MY LEGS I'M NOT FUCKING FINE," John shouted, but he felt he was probably closer to fine than he might otherwise have been.

"—and out," Jack said, and the connection went completely, with a _pop_ that made John's eardrums whine and sing.

"I have to spend six fucking hours with Steve on my legs?" John complained, trying to scratch the beast enough to make it move off him. All that happened was more drool and a stronger smell of horny bull.

"Yes," Jones said in a surprisingly un-gloating fashion. "Enjoy it."

"Sod you both," John said, "I'm going to sleep."


End file.
